Meet the 'jokers from London' who sold 100,000 blocks of butter in first 10 weeks

Rod Gilmour
Updated
All Things Butter sold over 100,000 blocks of butter sold in its first 10 weeks.
All Things Butter offers a chef-led approach that introduces new ways of cooking with the humble staple ingredient.

It’s not often you can call chefs work-shy, but when Thomas Straker was asked to push out more food content on his TikTok channel during COVID, it inadvertently inspired the launch of disruptive dairy brand All Things Butter.

“We were testing out a lot of videos and Thomas had a good following,” says co-founder Toby Hopkinson. “He was quite frankly being a bit lazy and was meant to be doing an all-singing, all-dancing dish for his social video, but he made a wild garlic butter on toast and it went viral crazy. I’d like to say there was a grand masterplan.”

Head chef Straker, who runs London-based Straker’s Restaurant, subsequently published 25 videos across one month which incorporated flavoured butter into his recipes and grew his social following by 1 million, while the channel’s content has garnered nearly 50 million likes. After four months, the duo looked into creating a product together. “The stars aligned,” says Hopkinson. “We had stumbled across it and ran with it.”

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Hopkinson, previously on the founding team at razor maker Harry's and then head of growth at CBD drinks brand Trip, quit his role in August 2023 as the pair set about launching their challenger brand.

“Butter has fallen into a category that it’s for toasting and baking. For us, the viral videos showed a versatility for it to be used in cooking,” says Hopkinson.

“When I was dreaming of the idea nearly two years ago I felt there was a lack of investment into getting people to cook with butter. It had a pretty bad rep for 20 years when the margarine alternatives came in.

Co-founders Toby Hopkinson and Thomas Straker are on a mission to place butter at the forefront of the digi-food generation. Photo: All Things Butter
Co-founders Toby Hopkinson, left, and Thomas Straker are on a mission to place butter at the forefront of the digi-food generation. Photo: All Things Butter

“It was like butter is high in saturated fat and essentially gave you heart disease. It was quite brutal the stuff that went out in the late 1990s.”

Their product is manufactured by Brue Valley Farm in Somerset, whose generational family have been farming for 500 years, with traditional methods including twice churning the butter to enhance the creaminess.

“It was funny going down there to a multi-generational farming family with our slightly wacky packaging,” recalls Hopkinson. “We told them the narrative of where we had come to and the opportunity to add some excitement to the category and they loved it. Other farms thought we were jokers from London.”

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In its first 10 weeks, All Things Butter sold 100,000 blocks as it set out to make headway into a £1.6bn category led by the likes of Flora and Lurpak.

Their initial plan had been to shy away from retailers and create a stir with online sales. But since November, the co-founders have secured listings into Ocado (OCDO.L), Planet Organic and Milk & More with their flavours including garlic and herb and chilli.

“From the off and our conversations with retailers, they believed in what we were doing,” adds Hopkinson.

All Things Butter is manufactured by Brue Valley Farm in Somerset, a production process that still uses traditional butter-making methods. Photo: All Things Butter
All Things Butter is manufactured by Brue Valley Farm in Somerset, a production process that still uses traditional butter-making methods. Photo: All Things Butter

“From a branding perspective we needed to hit notes that the modern consumer liked: organic, being British, doing it in a heritage way and supporting UK farmers. It was ripe from a challenger brand to come in and do something different.”

The co-founders first met at school over 20 years ago, with Hopkinson and Straker hailing from different backgrounds (Bolton and Hereford respectively), but aligned in the chef-led approach to their business.

While Straker cooks with butter due to the richness of flavour, most people still cook with oils at home. “The challenge is to continue that education of easy ways people can cook with butter to elevate their everyday cooking at home,” says Hopkinson.

“We have hardly cut through and we are still a small fish. It is a growth market for us and I do feel like we can fly the British flag.”

All Things Butter's Chilli flavoured butter. Photo: All Things Butter
All Things Butter's Chilli flavoured butter.

The firm partnered with the largest farming charity in the UK and pledges 1% of its top line revenue to the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution. Further, the co-founders harbour aspirations to be the largest butter brand in the UK.

“We are going in the right direction,” says a bullish Hopkinson. “We haven’t been shy to say that the US is the market we want to get into in the next few years.

"We feel that it is a category over there which has been unloved over the years and very heritage led. We thrive as a team to have those big carrots but there is lots of work ahead here [in the UK] first.”

Creating the brand

Our first name iteration was All Things Buttah. On Tom’s Instagram videos, his American followers took the mick out of him [for the way he pronounced butter]. The second iteration we changed to Butter. We took on an illustrator and I gave her a list of brands that I resonated with.

We needed to do something like what Oatly (OTLY) and Minor Figures were doing in the oats category and Beavertown and Camden Hells in the craft beer aisle. Everything is silver and gold in the butter aisle and we had to have something that caught people’s eye in an aisle that essentially hasn’t changed in 20 years.

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